kleef&co on Twitter

It’s great to use a visual aid to help understand the scale of a problem, and this video informs us well about trying to solve global poverty via increased immigration!

Also, the information contained in this video is both informative and accurate which is why I urge you to watch all of it. You’ll see another video (below) that will add much context to the overall conversation.

The question never was… ‘Can we solve global poverty by accepting high numbers of immigrants?’

Nobody with any serious education on the subject thinks that we can solve global poverty via accepting large numbers of immigrants. It was never the question, and no political science scholars or economists think in those terms.

1. Poverty is the measure of annual income in the Developed World.

2.Immigration is the measure of the number of people you allow into a country.

See how different those two things are?

The question is… ‘How can we boost the incomes of the world’s poorest so that tens of millions have no need to move to the Developed World as economic immigrants or refugees?’

The difference between Migrant and Refugee

And that is what the UN has been working on for the past couple of decades, with some measurable indicators of success via the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (or, MDG’s)

“The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) are the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion-while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability.” — Read more about the UN Millennium Development Goals here

One important term to remember is Developed World — and the definition is, “countries where most people earn more than $10. per day.”

The other important term to remember is Developing World — and the definition is, “countries where most people earn less than $10. per day.”

Here is the state of the world in the year 2000

In the year 2000, there were 6 billion people on the Earth.

Out of that 6 billion, only 1 billion earned more than $10. per day.

Another 1 billion earned between $1. and $10. per day.

The remaining 4 billion existed on less than $1 dollar per day.

Switch to 2015…

In the year 2015, there are 7.2 billion people on the Earth.

Out of that 7.2 billion, 2 billion earned more than $10. per day.

Out of that 7.2 billion, another 3.2 billion earned between $2.50 and $10. per day.

The other 2 billion existed on less than $2.50 per day.

In 2015, remember that only 2 billion people live in the Developed World. The other 5.2 billion people live in the Developing World.

At present rates of progress, by 2050 there should be nobody left in the ‘less than $10. per day’ category.

But ‘coasting on our to-date-accomplishments in this field’ is a plan that displays an astonishing Lack of Ambition because we could achieve those goals by merely ‘coasting’ on our 1980-2005 poverty eradication efforts!

So the fight is on — about what to do and how much to do. And if we don’t do enough, millions more will die horrible deaths by starvation, a lack of clean water, and a lack of proper sanitation — and the Developed World will face tens of millions of economic immigrants and refugees fleeing war-torn countries for many decades to come. It has the potential to become the ‘new normal’ if it isn’t handled properly on our watch.

The fight isn’t about whether accepting huge numbers of immigrants or refugees into Developed World will solve the problem of global poverty — the fight is about which plan will solve global poverty and raise every single person on the planet to a minimum $10. per day standard.

Here’s an excellent video with answers to many of the common misconceptions that the public and the media have about global poverty, global progress, and those tiny-by-comparison-numbers… the total number of immigrants and refugees accepted into each Developed World nation.

I’m positive that the following information will shock and inform you.

It nicely balances out the first video in this article that tends to get people riled up about immigration, particularly if they’re predisposed to dislike immigrants.

It’s a form of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that global poverty and the resultant refugee crisis can be solved via higher levels of immigration to the Developed World.

The solution, is to create working economies in the Developing World so that tens of millions of economic migrants, or refugees fleeing war-torn nations, have no need to flee to the Developed World in the first place.

Take the number 9 for example. It’s just a single digit. Nothing exceptional about it. Except that simple numbers can convey much information to thinking human beings.

Like the fact that 9 million people die annually from starvation and a lack of clean drinking water. If you total those annual deaths from the year 2000 until now, you get 135 million deaths from starvation/lack of clean drinking water.

There’s no rocket science in preventing starvation-related deaths. Simply give the necessary daily calories to people and they don’t die. The human body is an amazing machine, isn’t it? Nothing could be simpler.

Yet, decade after decade, millions of people continue to die from lack of food and clean water.

Therefore, let us look at the problem

Is there a lack of arable land on the Earth on which to grow crops? No, there is plenty of land to grow crops.

Is there a lack of water on the Earth? No, there is plenty of water.

Is there a lack of people on the Earth who could act as labourers to plant, water, and otherwise tend to crops? No, there are 7.2 billion people on the Earth and most of them don’t have gainful employment.

So it appears that the problem of 135 million people dying horribly from starvation and lack of water every 15 years, is a problem of economics more than anything else.

The United States alone wastes more food every year than it would take to feed those 9 million people per year. In fact, whole fields of mature crops are often plowed underground in order to keep prices high enough for farmers to produce food at profitable levels.

It’s not just the United States. Europe is just as wealthy as North America and it wastes almost as much food and water.

See what I did there?

If the U.S. wastes enough food to feed 9 million people per year AND Europe wastes enough food to feed 9 million people per year, that means we have twice as much food as we need to solve the entire problem right there!

Yes, it would cost something to transport the food to Haiti, Africa, Asia, and perhaps some locales in South America.

To feed 9 million people per year would cost something — even if the food was ‘degrade’ food, that is, food that isn’t quite up to Western world standards. “Western consumers don’t buy lopsided tomatoes” I was once told; “Those ones go in the trash.”

If we look at the scale of the problem we can compare it to other events

Take WWII for example. Some 60 million people were killed in that war, although estimates vary widely due to the lack of accurate record-keeping. Wikipedia suggests that the range is 50 to 80 million.

On top of those statistics, other sources say that an additional 50 million Chinese deaths occurred during WWII — mostly due to starvation as transportation links were severed and food could not be delivered.

We could speculate and say that there may have been as many as 80 million WWII (non-Chinese) deaths AND 50 million Chinese deaths mostly from starvation during and in the months after WWII. Perhaps more.

There are entire libraries dedicated to WWII, which cover the death count, the tactics employed by the various military units, and how that war finally ended. Every schoolchild learns about WWII and about the postwar economic boom which has heralded much wealth in the postwar era.

The amount of information freely available on the topic of World War II is staggering mainly due to the very high death toll of that war. Above, I mentioned that the total death toll from all sources in WWII could be as high as 130 million (or higher) when starvation deaths due to war were factored in.

Yet, we have that many people dying of starvation every 15 years — and that, in a time of relative peace!

No supply lines are cut off. Bomber aircraft are not dropping bombs on rice paddies, bridges, food warehouses, or dairy farms. The ocean shipping lanes are wide open (although there are tiny regions where piracy at sea is problematic) and statistically, air travel is still the safest form of travel on the planet.

So what gives?

Why aren’t there libraries full of information about the 9 million people who die every year due to starvation and related problems?

Why aren’t entire departments of universities not devoted to studying this issue, as there are in regards to WWII?

Why aren’t we selling ‘War Bonds’ and declaring ‘war’ on the ‘enemy’ like we did in WWII when we faced a threat similar in size and scope?

We beat the threat posed by the Axis Powers in 5 difficult years. But the starvation threat? Nobody knows about it.

Food aid agencies frequently report that people lose interest in solving the global starvation problem. A sort of ‘donor fatigue’ sets in (yes, that’s a term those agencies use) where nobody wants to hear about it as people begin to see the problem as ‘to large to solve’ and would rather not hear about it.

But we stopped WWII which was a bigger threat to humanity and we did it in 5 years! Which meant that tens of millions people wouldn’t die in each of the following 5 year periods.

What is the problem?

Why can’t we stop 9 million deaths per year?

Why can’t we stop 135 million deaths every 15 years?

Why aren’t we selling ‘War Bonds’ or ‘Food Bonds’ to pay shipping lines to transport all of our weird-looking tomatoes or other lopsided-looking fruits and vegetables, etc. to places where thousands of fellow human beings are dying by the day!

The simple answer is; We could solve it if we wanted to

It costs about $1 per day to feed a person. About 9 million people die per year from starvation. Which means that it would cost $3,285,000,000 to prevent 9 million deaths per year.

Even if we doubled that number to 6 billion dollars instead of 3.2 billion dollars annually to pay for unforeseen shipping costs (like a bridge needing repair due to local flooding, for example) or additional security around food distribution centres (to prevent theft and looting) this problem is eminently solvable.

Six billion dollars per year is nothing in the grand scheme of things. It is equal to 1/3 of the annual revenue from U.S. movie theatre tickets. And we wonder why we have terrorism…

We need $6 billion dollars per year and we need the same political will as we employed to win WWII to prevent another 135 million horrific deaths over the next 15 years.

This is humanity’s defining moment. Are we caring human beings, or are we just pretending? We’ll know who we are in 15 years…